


cold enough to chill my bones

by LaryssaD17



Series: Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted if the Father of Understanding Guides Us [18]
Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cold, Crack, Cuddles, Explicit Language, F/M, Intented humor, MY ENGLISH IS BAD PEOPLE I WARN YOU, Mission Fic, Modern Assassins (Assassin's Creed), Sharing a Bed, Sleepy Cuddles, Two losers falling in love, a lot of bad language, partners
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24119200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaryssaD17/pseuds/LaryssaD17
Summary: Desmond is cold. Layla is alone in bed.
Relationships: Layla Hassan & Desmond Miles, Layla Hassan/Desmond Miles
Series: Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted if the Father of Understanding Guides Us [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1685434
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	cold enough to chill my bones

**Author's Note:**

> English is not my first language so this can have errors.

Desmond is a simple guy. 

He can eat Chinese take-out one hundred times and he wouldn’t complain, he can spend hours in front of a computer and not even a motherfucking fire will distract him, and he can also (why the fuck not?) work under a lot of pressure when necessary. 

Desmond is a simple dude, he doesn’t complain of a lot of things (if Shaun and his British sassy ass is not involved, of course) and can survive in any fucking way (he has it on his blood after all) but, if there is something he hates with his life is the cold. 

The. Motherfucking. Cold. 

He hates it with all his might. Possible more than his relationship with his oh-so-perfect-dad and maybe the thing he hates the most (beside that) is the fact that it’s cold and he isn’t home. When is cold and he is at home, it doesn’t sound so horrible in his head, but now is cold and he is not home. Not even close. 

Desmond is currently in a mission -no, scratch that- the mission ended a long time ago and he is simply dying of cold in a hotel’s floor because Italy is more cold than he expected (he is sure that his first time there it wasn’t that cold). And the reason why he is in the floor with a pillow and a blanket is because he gave up the bed to Layla (his partner on the mission) and he now was regretting it. Even when Ezio told him that that was the correct thing to do, since Old Kenway was a miserly asshole and didn’t want to buck another room (something about that the Brotherhood doesn’t have money to ‘please your assess’). 

He didn’t like the cold or the hard floor, but the cold was the worst. Yes, it was worst because he only had a goddamn blanket and the floor was a motherfucking iceberg. He couldn’t sleep, even when he wrapped himself on the blanket like he was a burrito and count assassins jumping rooftops; it didn’t work. He even fixed the calefaction and it was still cold!

He tried to sleep again. He needs too. The journey back to the International Bureau was fucking long and he was sure that he was going to need the energy. So, he needed a warm and soft bed to sleep or at least a place not so cold. Desmond turned around again. He was hugging himself under the blanket to see if he could meet Morpheus and his lands of dreams, but he couldn’t. WHY IT WAS SO MOTHERFUCKING COLD?!

Desmond sits down and rubs his arms. He needs to do something before he dies of cold. When he stands up, he looks for a few seconds to his partner on the bed. She, apparently, is sleeping wrapped like a burrito in a blanket and he doesn’t understand how she can sleep so well with this cold. Like, they were even in the same room?  
Desmond gets his things in a very sloppy and rushed manner and throws them in a closet he finds near the bathroom. He walks (not so silently) to his suitcase under the bed and tries (in the darkness like he has night vision or something) to find his favorite hoddie to go out and walk for a few minutes to see if, in that way, he can be warm himself enough to sleep. When he doesn’t find anything (obviously) he curses and that’s when he hears Layla moving. 

“What the fuck are you doing?”, he looks at her kind of surprised, over the bed. 

Desmond has work with Layla Hassan for a couple of months and have never, he repeats, have never heard her curse. It’s kind of new and…he thinks is…cool and…sexy. Has he spent too much time with Ezio to think every woman is flirting with him? Mayyyyyyybe?

“Ehhh, sorry”, he says with a sheepish smile. “Sorry if I woke you up. I’m just…looking for something…in my-“

“Why can’t you sleep? You have been very loud”, he stops talking suddenly to look at her. It’s pitch-black in there, so he imagines how she is looking. 

“Sorry, love”, Desmond responds forgetting for a minute that Layla hates when they call her like that. “Sorry…again. Aren’t you cold? I’m freezing”, Desmond still, searches for that damn hoddie but he can’t find it. 

“Well, I asked you if you wanted the bed and you said and I quote: ‘No, sweetheart, I can manage like a man’,” he isn’t looking at her but he can imagine her crossing her arms over her chest and that makes him chuckle. It was the truth, the one he regrets. 

Desmond doesn’t say anything and decides to turn on the bedside lamp near him to look at the suitcase better. 

“Did Ezio told you something about me?”, Layla’s tone is serious, and he knows it can mean bad news.

He stops for a second and looks at her. She is like he imagine it: crossed arms, messy and lose hair that makes her look different and that serious look she always gives him when he says something idiotic (like that time they found the statue of the ever-lasting Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad and he said a really dumb ass thing). 

“No”, he answers but is a lie. 

Ezio, indeed told him something- reality was that he told him a lot of things about her, but he isn’t going to tell her none of it because it will cause some problems and he wants to conserve his head glued to his neck, thank you very much. 

“You are lying”, he knows that it’s not a question, and Desmond ignores it because he finds his hoddie. 

“Oh, here you are little fucker”, he says to himself with a happy smile while standing up after closing the suitcase. He starts to put it on, and Layla stays silent but talks before he can say that he is leaving. 

“Whatever Ezio told you about me is not exactly true”, she says, and Desmond is not good with awkward situations. “I was with the enemy before and I know that Ezio nor Edward trust me too much, but I’m not going to kill you or steal from you something that almost cost me my life”, when Desmond finishes to put on his hoddie, he looks at her trying to sound calm and like himself. 

“Hey, doll, it’s nothing about that. It’s simply that I don’t want to make you uncomfortable”. 

“You are a very bad liar, Miles”, he rolls his eyes and scratches his neck. 

“I’m been honest”, he wasn’t. 

Ezio told him a lot of things about her. That Layla Hassan worked for the enemy for a few years, that she was a brilliant persona, kind of reckless (who isn’t? probably Connor or Evie will get offended with that comment) and that she was a little unstable because she had a…very bad experience…that left her…traumatized. Something about mummies, the origins of the Brotherhood and his father making her switch sides. He didn’t know the details and he isn’t someone to judge mess up lives (because he has one hell of mess up life too), but Ezio and Edward still told him to be careful and not get too close. That included not sleeping in the same bed. 

“No, you are not. Look, you don’t need to lie to me. I know Ezio told you a lot of me and all that bullshit but, honestly, I’m not going to kill you and betray the Brotherhood. If I wanted that, I will have done it already”, her tone is a serious one, but Desmond swears he can hear some hurt in it. He can’t blame her; he doesn’t have a very good reputation in the Brotherhood either. 

Desmond Miles? Oh, yeah, you mean that idiot dude who no one’s likes and have serious daddy issues, and everyone talks to him because his family is full of famous assassins and he is the only one fucked up? Hell, yeah, I met him once. He is just in the Brotherhood, because Ezio Auditore da Firenze and Edward Kenway are his granddaddies, out of it, he is just a loser. 

Yeah. Desmond heard that description of himself once and it was one of the worst things ever when he was a novice. But thanks to Rebecca and Shaun (well, he not so much) he got his shit together and, even if he was more of a desk person, he came to peace with his family (if we get William Miles out of the equation) and felt useful to the Brotherhood in his own way. 

So, Desmond understands her in some way and he maybe, just maybe, thinks that Ezio was being too paranoid with her. If he be honest, he likes Layla. She is different, she is good to talk too, and he likes to see how well she gets with Rebecca because they have the hacking thing in common. Yes, Desmond likes her, not romantically, YET (he doesn’t understand why the hell he thought that with Ezio’s voice. Maybe he has spent too much time with the old man, yes, that was it), but he doesn’t think that Layla is going to betray them or kill him, at least not today because she looks exhausted. 

When Desmond gets out of his head, Layla is laying back on bed and in silence. He understands that she doesn’t want to talk anymore and that maybe he offended her but well, he isn’t going to apologize because he didn’t do anything wrong. 

Desmond sighs and hugs himself again because even with his hoddie he is still freezing. He doesn’t even understand why Italy decided to be cold right now. He remembers that he putted his hoodie to go out, when he stops suddenly. 

Desmond feels too tired to go, and Layla kind of said that he could sleep in bed. Well, it’s easier to ask for a space that going out to jog and been kidnap again. He evaluates the shit for a couple of seconds only because he was realistic and the bed thing it was just Ezio’s instructions (‘when do I even follow instructions’) and because of the cold (bringing couples together since the beginning of the world) make him decide fast. 

“Lay”, he uses the nickname he has for her. 

He is sure that she hates it, but she has never complained, at least not like when he calls her love or babe. He has a nickname for everyone (Ezio is grandpa Ez, Edward is Old Kenway, his father is Bill pain in the ass, Shaun is the second pain in the ass, Rebecca is Becca, Evie is Eve, Jacob is Jake, Connor is Young Kenway, Arno is Arny because he gets annoyed by it and Kassandra is Kassie because she hates it) and he gave her one too to make her feel part of the group when she first arrived a few months back. 

“Hmm”, she responds, giving him her back. He smiled in his heart for no reason. 

“Can we share the bed?”. 

“Yeah, whatever”. 

Desmond doesn’t lose any time and jumps in bed in five seconds (after turning off the light) and wraps himself in the blankets and gets comfortable. He feels way better now, even when he is still cold. He looks at her, Layla is still giving him her back. He suddenly remembers one of Evie’s nerd conversations with Shaun about hot and cold, about that cold can be solved with body heat. 

The idea is risky, it can chop his head off like those pictures that Arno show him once when he asked what happened with royalty in the French Revolution and he, clearly, is too young and handsome to die now, so he turns around, wraps himself tighter and tries to count to fall sleep because he is way comfortable now in bed. 

He is counting the eighteen rooftop that his imaginary Altaïr is jumping in an unknown city, when he feels her move and hears his name. 

“Des”, if feels weird for a second because she usually calls him Miles, she doesn’t even call him Desmond. 

“Wha?”, he says growling a little because dream Altaïr fucking fell from the rooftop and he lose the count. 

“It’s cold”. 

“I know, babe”. 

“Can you get a little closer?”, his eyes open in a matter of milliseconds and he can’t stop himself from turning his head around. Did he fucking hear right? 

“What?”, Layla rolls her eyes, or at least that it’s what he thinks she did, because he can’t see shit. 

“I’m cold, you are freezing, and human body radiate heat, so if we get closer, we can get warm”, he is both surprised and confused.

Surprise because Layla doesn’t like to get too close to people (both sentimentally and physically) and confused because she sounds like Shaun explaining some weird shit about History, but for some reason, he will listen to her hundreds of times before Shaun’s. 

“Am…”, the situation is so unreal that Desmond thinks that he simply fell asleep. But before he could say something stupid, he said: “Yeah, okay”. 

Getting closer felt awkward, but when he rounds her with his arms and she cuddles in his chest and hugs him back, everything felt way better because heat was being exchanged and cold was getting away. It felt weird to hug someone you don’t know very much in a bed, but Desmond and Layla justify it like something necessary to survive. 

The next morning, when he woke up and he was wrapped in her arms, he said to himself that he wouldn’t mind waking up with her like her. Until he remembered that they needed to take a plane at nine and it was 8:15 in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> Tittle from the song Cold by Maroon Five.


End file.
